At the end of Keele Street, where black asphalt gives way to even blacker earth, the freshest celery you'll never eat climbs a conveyor and plunges into the open box of a transport truck.
“This stuff's getting shipped out of the country,” Rick Horlings says, as the autumn sky brews up a cold drizzle over his family business, Hol-Mar Farms.
It's harvest time in the Holland Marsh, one of the most fertile vegetable gardens in North America, where 135 farmers work 10,000 acres planted squarely in Toronto's back yard. Familiar to any summer cottager caught in a Highway 400 traffic jam, the Marsh's unique muck soil pumps out everything from bok choy and beets to cauliflower and carrots, in all more than $50-million worth – or 14 per cent of Ontario's vegetables – each year.
And yet, for all the thanks urban locavores might give for such a vast and valuable resource, less than half of the Holland Marsh's output lands on our plates. The rest, about 55 per cent, is exported, including 450 tonnes of Mr. Horlings' crisp, green celery this year.
To foodie and farmer alike, this statistic symbolizes the growing sense of folly around our globalized food system, which lines supermarket shelves with cheap, tasteless imports and sees farmers a mere 50 kilometres away plying foreign markets in search of a fair wage.
For the same reason, the Holland Marsh holds huge potential for positive change, as a growing number of Toronto consumers open their minds, mouths and wallets to the oft-cited benefits of local food: its better taste and nutrition, smaller environmental footprint and local economic spinoffs and its ability to bolster the sovereignty of Toronto's food supply.
“We could feed everybody in Toronto and there'd be food left over,” says Jamie Reaume, executive director of the Holland Marsh Growers' Association, which formed last year in part to seize the momentum of the local food movement. “My farmers would be damn happy about that.”
The shoots of this shift have already begun to sprout in the Marsh, a slender, low-lying flatland that curves northeast from upper York Region to the southern tip of Lake Simcoe.
Drained for agriculture since the 1920s using 28 kilometres of canals, the region used to send an even larger share of its produce to the export market, mostly for processing in the United States, Mr. Reaume said. This is because the Marsh's family farmers, who tend relatively small plots by industry standards, haven't been able to feed the voracious demands of ever-larger supermarket chains.
As the chains' distribution systems have become more centralized, buyers favour larger producers abroad over small local farmers, who can't offer the same economies of scale. Foreign suppliers can also provide items that can't be grown, at least not economically, in Canada.
Over time, consumers have grown accustomed to shelves filled with a variety of cheap fruits and vegetables regardless of season, but, in recent years, they've become more conscious of the hidden costs – greenhouse-gas emissions, less-tasty produce bred to withstand distant transport, labour and environmental abuses in source countries – wrought by too many “food miles.”
The arrival of farmers' markets throughout Toronto, events such as the Picnic at the Brick Works and buzz around such books as The 100-Mile Diet and The Omnivore's Dilemma offer signs that city dwellers are demanding more local produce from their grocers.
With the Holland Marsh on Toronto's back doorstep, that would seem easy, but as Mr. Reaume points out, the global supply chain took more than 30 years to develop, and undoing it “is like steering a ship; you can only do it in small increments.”
For their part, farmers have begun to expand their offerings beyond carrots and onions – traditional favourites that still make up 70 per cent of Holland Marsh output – to suit the diverse demands of a cosmopolitan city. “We're growing 47 crops this year in the Marsh,” Mr. Reaume says, including Chinese cabbage, purple carrots and various herbs.
